From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Sat Oct 05 2002 - 12:06:02 BST
Sam,
Elizaphanian wrote:
> Hi Scott R,
>
> Is this book something you've mentioned before? It's ringing lots of bells
> with me but I can't recall the context. Could you say a bit more about the
> author and what his approach is? (The title appeals to my predilections if
> nothing else)
>
Here's what I wrote a few months ago on it (6/21):
A while back I mentioned a book that, if I could only persuade everyone
on this list to read, I would think my life's work to be done (not
really :). It is Owen Barfield's "Saving the Appearances: A Study in
Idolatry". It addresses exactly this question [on the emrgence of the
intellectual level], and gives a very interesting answer to it. Briefly,
he claims (as Julian Jaynes did later in The Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind) that prior to the post-Homeric Greeks, there wasn't an
intellectual level. There was language, and there was something related
to thinking, but the latter was qualitatively different from what we
call thinking. By studying Homer, and other sources, he finds no
understanding that thinking is something "I" do. Rather, it was more
like voices from outside.
Even more interesting is that perception was also different. From
anthropological work, he finds a consistent pattern of perception being
more than what it is for us. For us, it is something like "seeing a tree
is seeing form and color", but in earlier times it was more like seeing
the outer form AND the spiritual tree "behind" it.
In other words "mythical" thinking was not a matter of ignorant people
experiencing what we do and then explaining it with silly ideas of gods,
but an accurate description of what WAS EXPERIENCED.
The story goes on. The post-Homeric Greeks were the first to "think
about" things. However, it was only a gradual process before the
thinking came to be completely experienced as "my" thinking, only
completed around 500 years ago, and which made the scientific revolution
possible, and lo SOM (Descartes) was born. Barfield's point is that SOM
-- the clear separation of the subject from the object wasn't possible
until this evolution of consciousness occurred.
And, of course, consciousness will continue to evolve, with the next
development being the re-merging of the subject and object worlds, ie,
what we now call mystical transcendence of SO dualism.
My own take on all this with respect to "defining the intellectual
level" is that it doesn't fully exist yet. The closest we come is with
mathematics, where there is no object. Instead the thinking is the
mathematics -- there are no mathematical objects being thought about.
(This requires more detail, but another time). I might also add (with
respect to the question of feeling and intellect) is that now mostly
feeling is a matter of reaction. When the intellectual level come into
its own, then it carries its own feeling, that is feeling and thinking
merge -- again the closest I can guess at might be the aesthetic
pleasure of doing mathematics, though perhaps music is another case.
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 10:37:53 GMT